Found Weekend

A quarter century too late to make him rich or famous, Murray
Lerner's Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970, at the
Film Forum, joins three earlier documentaries of the '60s in
viewing that vast, vague decade and concept through the metaphor
of the rock festival: D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop, Michael
Wadleigh's Woodstock, and the Maysles Brothers and Charlotte
Zwerin's Gimme Shelter. As with Woodstock--but not
Monterey Pop, which as the most utopian of these films had damn well
better make good on the pleasures it promises, or Gimme Shelter, powered
by a band that has always made antiutopian pleasure its
specialty--the music that's supposed to sell the flick isn't so
hot. Instead, like all the others, Message to Love is carried by
an argument that's both persuasive and partial, a nod to
entertainment value that's truer to the moment it hit the
theatres than the occasion it represents.

In Monterey Pop, the music and its 50,000 or 90,000
celebrants are like a wonderful secret--wonderful because even
though everyone knows about it, it still delivers the thrill of
discovery. Unveiled in 1968, Pennebaker's vision of the 1967
event was instrumental in convincing potential organizers and
participants that music was the healthiest way to crystallize the
energy of a counterculture that by then seemed both blessedly
inevitable and dangerously embattled. Poof, Woodstock--only
before Wadleigh's edit was off the table there was also the
anti-Woodstock, Altamont. One reason Woodstock is wryer than
Monterey Pop is that the counterculture constituency was no longer
gullible enough to buy its own peace-and-love bullshit uncut--by
1970, the myth of the '60s had taken on a layer of the protective
irony that had long proven useful shtick for Zen gurus and Yippie
troublemakers alike. Now as then, the film is a better
advertisement for the fans than for the music that brought them
together, most engaging when it focuses on its chosen cross-section of
Woodstock Nation's 300,000 or 500,000 fools--sometimes
wise or sainted, always self-righteous/self-deluded/self-whatever. But
it was too hip and funny to be accused of spreading
the false rumor that any such gathering could last longer than a
found weekend.

Not that a little irony was enough to discourage a new bunch
of fools in Great Britain, where neither of the counterculture's
preconditions, postwar affluence and the ideology of
classlessness, were ever as prevalent as they were here. And so
the 1970 Isle of Wight festival--the third annual, as Lerner
fails to indicate--attracted another 300,000 or 500,000
longhairs, a conflux directly inspired, as then 19-year-old
underground journalist Charles Shaar Murray's U.K. review of
Message to Love recalls, by Wadleigh's just-released depiction of
"a rural idyll of sex without jealousy or disease, dope without
addiction or bad trips, and `breakfast in bed for 500,000.'"
Looking back, however, Lerner has no room for Wadleigh's cross-section.
His fan interviews are all with guys (no gals) who--whether they come off
scary or goofy, addled or enlightened--share a sense of absolute entitlement
that dovetails thematically with the tension between money-minded bizzers
and free-everything
radicals that drives the film. There's not much suggestion of
what listening to music in an immense company of like-minded
souls might have been like for the hippies, yobs, and/or rock and
roll fans whose trek to this Victorian artists' haven turned
modern tourist trap occasioned all the rabble-rousing and
behind-the-scenes machinations.

This is less a criticism than an observation. The film is
fine fun the way Lerner constructed it, as a basically comic
critique of the two historical forces that can be said to have
battled over the aforementioned preconditions, the more material
of which was just then disappearing from the face of the earth as
our industrialized standard of living stopped rising. If you miss
it, Columbia/Legacy's two-CD soundtrack provides an excellent
taste of how stupid the festival's "absolutely mind-boggling list
of superstar artists!" could be. Three weeks from death, Jimi
Hendrix introduces a famously lackluster set by reporting that he
just woke up. Joni Mitchell demonstrates her cultural superiority
by holding forth about Hopis and tourists. Kris Kristofferson
announces, "We're gonna do two more in spite of anything except
rifle fire," then skulks off after one. Emerson, Lake & Palmer
are ELP and vice versa. And the inimitable Joan Baez explains how
the radicals' demand for free admission responds to "an evil
stinking rotten world," only: "I am not going to be forced into
giving a free concert because they insist on me giving a free
concert. That doesn't make sense either."

The soundtrack also makes clear that the artists have
nothing on the Brit bikers, French anarchists, and American world
travelers of Desolation Row, as the ultimately victorious
nonpaying encampment outside the festival's galvanized-steel
fence was officially dubbed, much less the three promoters, who
say such things as, "We put this festival on, you bastards, with
a lot of love, and if you want to break our walls down and you
want to destroy it, well, you go to hell," and, even better, "We
have a fire on stage. If there's any firemen anywhere who can
help us put the fire out as soon as possible . . . " But both
sides should really be seen as well as heard--the wild-eyed rads
so self-whatever they can conceive no reality beyond their
proximity to the stage, the foppish promoters striving wanly to
convince the audience, the camera, and themselves that all they
want is to do a little good in the world.

The Maysles' dystopian Altamont movie, the class of the
field intellectually (and visually) as well as musically,
emphasized the chasm between the artists and the audience who
under the new countercultural dispensation were supposed to be
their equals. This was an essential point at the time, perfect
for a band so charismatic it could carry a whole movie and so
cynical that its distance from its fans and everything else was
already an established part of its act. A quarter century later,
Lerner, understandably, goes for a more analytic, historical
approach. So he schematizes hippiedom's assumed failures and
hypocrisies into a doomed conflict between me-first boomers and
the implacable forces of capital, with both sides more wrong than
right. His parable is persuasive because in broad outline it's
undeniable and because it's peopled with mind-boggling buffoons.
But it's partial as well--not just because it ignores the
innocents in the middle, many of whom are assuredly growing up or
experiencing some measly measure of liberation despite the
contradictions, but because in the end the buffoons are too
inconsequential to symbolize much. The anonymous radicals are
lost to history, while the promoters, Ray and Ron Falk and Ricky
Farr, lack even the paltry mythic resonance of John Phillips,
Mike Lang, and Melvin Belli, who personify power in the other
movies.

Lerner, in fact, doesn't bother to provide their last names,
which I obtained from Isle of Wight native Mike Plumbley,
coauthor of the self-published Isle of Wight Rock: A Music
Anthology (Isle of Wight Rock Archives, Palmer's Forge, Newport
Road, Niton, Isle of Wight, U.K.). Always clueless about English
accents, I'd assumed the Falks were the same kind of hapless rich
kids who backed so many other mysterious '60s ventures, but in
fact they were local printers whose 1968 festival featured
Jefferson Airplane raising funds for a swimming pool that somehow
never got built and whose much larger 1969 do, headlined by a
famously lackluster Bob Dylan, seeded
number three. Although many acts didn't get paid, there are
observers who believe the Falks sold a lot more of those £3
tickets they're forever whining about (at a time when a week in a
bedsit cost £4) than they claimed--including, Plumbley reports,
an employee who says he went off to print more as late as
Saturday night. Hmmm. As for imported biz pro and fatuous
majordomo Farr, the successful music career attributed to him in
Lerner's credits apparently ended up in an L.A. sound equipment
company.

Since it took poor Lerner 26 years to complete what was
clearly a labor of pride and love--can you imagine what getting
the permissions must have been like?--I'd never suggest he should
have made a different movie. But wouldn't it be fun to follow the
money in a sequel?